Are You Fitter Than a Caveman?

We might have iPhones, but ancient humans had a lot on us when it comes to fitness, according to a paper recently presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Calgary, Alberta.

In it, Cambridge University researcher Alison Macintosh said that the fitness of pre-farming humans vastly outstripped even today’s most-elite athletes. In Central Europe, the human fitness decline began around the emergence of agriculture, approximately 5,300 B.C.

At that time, early farmers had bone rigidity comparable to that of today’s Cambridge University cross-country runners, she found. (Load-bearing exercises, such as running, build bone strength.)

But as early as 2,300 B.C., average human mobility was comparable to sedentary college students today, Macintosh found.

Which is why, “The lesson to be learned is not from early farmers and their dietary and exercise patterns, but rather from our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their dietary and exercise patterns," Dr. Loren Cordain, professor emeritus of health and exercise science at Colorado State University and author of The Paleo Diet, told Outside Online. “These examples represent the norms for our species and the environmental experiences which conditioned our genome.”

This where modern fitness movements, such as Erwan Le Corre’s MovNat, come in. “Today, most people’s definition of fitness is centered around whether they look fit,” Le Corre told weather.com. “But that doesn’t mean anything. When you think natural movement skills, you think in terms of walking, running, jumping, climbing. Manipulative skills such as lifting, throwing, catching, self-defense fighting skills.” Le Corre himself climbs trees, sprints, crawls, carries logs, hikes and much more as part of his own functional fitness routine.

Humans 30,000 to 150,00 years ago held all these skills, traveling long distance carrying heavy weight. “They were much stronger than the long-distance runners of today,” Dr. Colin Shaw of Cambridge University’s Phenotypic Adaptability, Variation and Evolution Research Group told Outside. “The people back then were monsters by comparison. What you see today is quite pathetic.”

Le Corre compared these humans to existing hunter-gatherers, "modern humans living in ancestral ways.” Le Corre explained: “What’s for sure is they can endure days going with little food, very cold environments, hot environments, tough environments. They have agility, mobility [and] coordination, strength, endurance, awareness [and] alertness. They are physically competent, and they can move and perform in practical ways whatever ways needed in the environment where they live.”

A return to a more natural, primal life is also the theory behind The Paleo Diet, a vastly popular lifestyle in which followers forgo grains, dairy, sugar, legumes and anything artificial — basically all foods that would have been inaccessible to humans before the farming age.

Ancient humans weren’t exactly swilling sodas, but there is some evidence that their diet wasn’t quite as grain and sweet free as some Paleo advocates believe, according to new research.

After studying the teeth of humans living about 15,000 years ago, Louise Humphrey, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum in London, found evidence that they ate sweet corn and acorns, decaying their teeth far before the advent of agriculture.

This was a surprise — a 2010 study of early humans in Peru found few cavities among the population. It was widely believed that the “age of cavities” began when farming did, thanks to an increase in carbohydrates.

Humphrey’s finding is one of many changing the modern view of Paleothicic carb consumption, she told weather.com in an email. “There is evidence for exploitation of carbohydrates at some other Paleolithic sites, and its possible that the extent to which plants were used in earlier periods has been underestimated,” she said.

Really, Humphrey’s paper shows that humans are adaptable. “More generally, the diets eaten by ancient humans would have varied according to the types of food available in the environment in which they lived, so it is not really possible to talk about a single Paleolithic diet,” she explained. “People are remarkably adaptable and would have exploited different types foods in different parts of the world and different habitats.”

This adaptability is partially because early humans only ever ate plants that were in season and available, along with a “variety of wild plant foods, together with edible land snails and some wild animals," Humphrey said. "The most abundant plants remains were acorns and pine nuts."

A word to the wise, though, for any Paleo people: Acorns can be toxic for us modern humans when eaten raw.